Nonetheless, with Netflix attracting so much investor scrutiny right now, thanks to the recent price hike, the loss of its deal with Starz, reduced subscriber guidance and now the planned rebranding of the DVD-by-mail business, the topic is attracting some new attention.

Here's some of the discussion from the July filing:

The SEC: We note your ... disclosure that you plan to cease providing gross subscriber additions, subscriber acquisition costs and churn. We continue to believe that disclosure of rates of churn would be useful to investors since disclosure of the total number of subscribers who discontinued the service can high light important operating trends and therefore request reconsideration of discontinuing this metric. Please advise.

Netflix: As mentioned in our previous response, management believes that in a largely fixed-cost streaming world with ease of cancellation and subsequent rejoin, net additions provides the most meaningful insight into our business performance and consumer acceptance of our service. The churn metric is a less relevant and reliable measure of business performance, and does not accurately reflect consumer acceptance of our service.

Our service is offered on a month-to-month basis. We do not require long term commitments from our subscribers. We have made it very easy to exit and rejoin our service and believe that this type of consumer-friendly approach to providing our service has benefited our overall consumer appeal. The ease of cancellation and rejoins is evidenced by the fact that approximately one-third of gross subscriber additions are former subscribers who have rejoined the service, many within the same year. This ability to freely cancel and rejoin may result in a higher level of churn than we would otherwise experience, and could be viewed as a negative business development; however, we believe that this has actually been beneficial to our operating results in the form of a lower cost of subscriber acquisition.

As the Netflix subscriber base and revenues have grown and as we have shifted our service offering toward streaming content, churn has become less relevant and management has come to rely more and more on net subscriber additions versus churn to monitor and describe the business. For the past several years, churn has remained relatively unchanged. Furthermore, potential changes to our service, such as shifting towards individual memberships as opposed to household memberships or offering credential-less free trials, could cause churn to increase. However, these changes are likely to result in higher net additions in subscribers and higher revenues.

In addition to the foregoing, we respectfully advise the Staff that several similar subscription services, including Comcast, Time Warner Cable and Charter, do not report churn, indicating that investors do not necessarily consider churn an important metric for measuring the performance of a subscription business.

Janney Capital analyst Tony Wible weighed in on this topic this morning, and takes the position that Netflix should continue to provide data on customer churn. "This effort to hide useful information should be seen by investors as yet another red flag," he writes in a research note. "For the record (speaking as both an analyst and as a member of the NYSE Research Examination Committee), I believe churn, gross sub, additions, free sub, and SAC are all very important metrics, especially as the company's accounting seems aggressive and insider sales are troubling."

With scrutiny of the company's business high, I tend to agree with Wible that this is not the right moment in time to start reducing the amount of data made available to investors.